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The Reverend Canon Mpho Tutu, daughter of the famed Archbishop Desmond Tutu, last week got married to her female partner Professor Marceline van Furth.
Her lesbian marriage stands in stark contrast to her parents, who recently renewed their wedding vows on the occasion of their 60th wedding anniversary.
Mpho Tutu exchanged vows in a small private ceremony, with her longtime partner Professor Marceline Furth in Oegstgeest a town and municipality in the province of South Holland in western Netherlands, with a planned celebration of the marriage to be held in Cape Town in May.
This is Tutu’s second marriage, after her previous one to Joseph Burris, with whom she bore two daughters. Mpho Tutu is an ordained Episcopal priest, the executive director of the Desmond and Leah Tutu Legacy Foundation, and also the executive director and founder of the Tutu Institute for Prayer and Pilgrimage. Her Dutch partner Furth, is a professor in Pediatric Infectious Diseases at the Vrije University in Amsterdam, and holds the Desmond Tutu Chair in Medicine at the university. “The couple are very grateful to their families and friends for their love and support‚” the family said in a statement announcing the news.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who led a decades-long fight against racial discrimination in South Africa, says the oppression of gay people around the world is the "new Apartheid."
Tutu says he will never worship a "homophobic God" and will rather go to hell.